


full of grace

by sinagtala (strikinglight)



Category: Fire Emblem Echoes: Mou Hitori no Eiyuu Ou | Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, Fire Emblem Series
Genre: Burns, Corporal Punishment, F/M, Heart-to-Heart, I Don't Even Know, I'm Sorry, Pre-Canon, Scars, some implied creepy duma faithful stuff i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-07
Updated: 2017-08-07
Packaged: 2018-12-12 13:37:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11738163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/sinagtala
Summary: Neither of them has been trained to mercy, and yet there are traces of something similar to it here.Rinea rolls up her sleeves.





	full of grace

**Author's Note:**

> _And can you do what you are sorry for?_
> 
> — John Berryman

The truth is that, even at midwinter when the snow is freshly fallen, Rinea wants only to have the house to herself.

“My parents beg your forgiveness that they’re unable to receive you, my lord.”

The truth is that she’d neglected to tell her parents that she was expecting him before they set out this morning, that it might have been a little more than an unfortunate accident for his arrival to follow their departure so soon. Looking back it had been so easy she feels almost guilty, to answer his request from earlier in the week to visit her with the assurance that she’d gladly welcome his company at her residence two days hence. And then to buy the servants’ silence with a couple of coins pressed into each hand and the promise of no extra work that evening beyond stabling the prince’s horse and clearing the dishes after the evening meal: _I’ll see to everything else. Please rest. Please say nothing of this._ Unspoken: _Please just let me have this time._

It’s not so much that they’ve both gotten accustomed to embroidering the truth, with others, with each other. Only that somehow they both understand that the particulars of certain things are better left undiscussed, for the sake of convenience, or comfort. On the one hand, not telling the entire truth has always seemed just a step away from an outright lie; on the other, she can concede that these silences have their virtues, too, in their way. More to the point, as she knows he would say, they have their uses.

The truth is that he hadn’t even asked her to explain herself and her empty house, not when he arrived at dusk, not later at the dinner table or now in the drawing room as he sheds his cloak and gloves and sits drawn and pensive in her father’s armchair. The truth is the apology had spilled out of her in spite of all her preparations.

“They’ve gone to visit with a relative of ours for the next fortnight; the fault was mine for—”

“Not at all.” He’s always quiet when he visits her, as he never is when she comes to the castle, ever chafing and distracted and wrestling with who knows how many hundreds of other things that demand his attention. They have some hope here, at least, of being well and truly alone. If not much else. “Not at all. Peace, Rinea.”

She’s used to it, now, doing everything herself. Unbuttoning her cuffs, rolling her sleeves down. Reaching for the poker to prod at the coals in the fireplace and feeding the embers with tinder. _Peace, Rinea._

The flame throws light on her hands and arms, casting strange shadows where the skin webs and warps; she sees his eyes follow, too quickly.

“Come here a moment.”

The sound of his voice gives her pause, holding the poker half in the fire, frowning down at the metal spike already beginning to glow red. This is not so much a secret as merely something she forgot—or told herself she forgot, had never meant to hide—and so, slowly, she allows herself to return it to its stand and move back toward him. She pulls a second chair close to his and allows him to take her wrist in his hand, watches as he turns it over to inspect the column of old scars running down the inside of her forearm—the four pale horizontal lines like fingers on a hand of flame, gripping and searing.

“As a child, I was bad with time. I’d lose track of the hours playing in the garden, and miss the evening prayers. My mother or father would have to come find me and—” She bites her lip, moves to draw her hand away. “Forgive me, this is an unpleasant topic of conversation.”

Berkut holds firm. His fingertips do not pause on the path they trace over her skin, meandering gently in loose S-shapes.

“It’s the bone that hurts on the first day after burning,” he says, without looking up. “An ache, like you’ve been struck with something hard. Then it builds. You feel it most in the flesh after around three days—it chafes every time you move, under any kind of clothing, no matter how light. Right?”

Exactly right. She remembers what it was like, doubled over on the floor of this room with one arm crooked against her chest, her forehead to the floorboards in obeisance. How she’d learned to bite down on the end of her shawl to stifle a scream, for fear a scream would warrant another burn, and tears yet another.

“You and I are of a kind,” he says.

The scars she sees when he releases her arm and pushes up one sleeve are less cleanly healed than hers, the puckered flesh a dull red that makes her widen her eyes before she can stop herself. She’s familiar enough with wounds to know by sight which ones are forgotten as soon as they’ve been inflicted. “Who would dare raise a hand against the crown prince, though?”

“The crown prince’s father, as it happens.” His mouth has twisted into something crooked and wry. “For such offenses as speaking out of turn, going riding without permission, dropping his spear during a sparring bout. And missing his prayers.”

She peers into his face, half in shadow from the flickering fire, and finds she’s not afraid—only that it aches slightly to look at him, like moving a newly mended limb and feeling how the scar tissue pulls at the flesh around it. This is not the first time she’s caught herself wondering about the kind of person he might have been, before they ever met.

“Did you have to kneel on the stones, too?”

“In the chapel, on raw sea salt? Every time.”

Rinea remembers all of it. What some children paid for in tears, others paid for in salt, jagged-edged crystals scattered across the chapel floor. Kneeling to pay penance for every missed devotion, the skin raw, every bone trembling. Outside the door, voices that sounded like the screams of the gulls down at the harbor: _your daughter,_ your _daughter,_ though the truth was she was both of theirs, though the truth was she belonged to neither.

Rinea’s skin is pale. It burns in the sun, and bruises when caught in a tight grip, and scars where it’s cut. And though scars are not the blight in Rigel that she’s heard they are in the south—a softer land, she can’t help thinking, one where the sun shines—she cannot glory in them the way she’s told she should. _Our daughter is devout—_ which is to say only that she’s learned to be patient with pain.

“I apologize, my lord.” Eyes to the ground, as she’s been taught, when asking forgiveness. “I’ve been forgetting myself.”

She knows there are different ways they might be punished now. Or, rather, that they’ve been taught to punish themselves to spare others the trouble, now that the years have wrung them out and the prayers they never miss are the ones they repeat silently even without thought—how to be worth something, how to be worthy _._ The truth is she hates all these patterns she doesn’t know how to unlearn, but she’s not sure if she can say this to him, even alone together the way they are now, talking with one another in ways they don’t talk with anyone else.

“If any harm comes to you again...” There’s something not quite right about the way he says it. Some hesitation, some entreaty mirrored in the furrow across his brow and the delicate way he cradles her hands between his own. Certainly nothing she’s ever heard in his voice before. “I would want to know.”

Rinea wonders what he might do, if she ever did tell him. What he _could_ do. But then again, perhaps it’s not the doing that’s important, so much as the knowing. So much as finding someone who might—perhaps, and this is a great _perhaps_ —understand.

Certainly she knows she doesn’t see him to seek his protection, however it might look to the eyes that haunt her steps as she walks the halls of the castle. It’s a tempting thought, all the same, that they might share this. Neither of them has been trained to mercy, and yet there are traces of something similar to it here.

“I wish the same,” she says, leaning toward him in the firelight—wondering for a moment if it might still be possible to believe.

**Author's Note:**

> I have to confess I'm not entirely sure what happened here please forgive me omg. I have way too many extrapolatory Berinea thoughts, and while there's nothing specific about her family in canon (not much of anything her-related, lbr), I'm intrigued by the idea that she and Berkut have strained family relationships and a palpable dislike of the Duma Faithful and their Ways in common. Which I guess is how this happened (?????).
> 
> For the record I'm not sure the in-game timeline allows for a very long courtship period for these two, but I like to exercise poetic license and give them one anyway, if only so they can get to know each other better and bond over sad and stressful things they don't share with anyone else. As well as, you know, experience some semblance of Actual Happiness, however briefly.
> 
> Title from Sarah McLachlan's ["Full of Grace"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjlGG3LTyEU). "If all of the strength and all of the courage / come and lift me from this place, / I know I could love you much better than this, / full of grace, full of grace, my love" is a Mood.


End file.
